Ice Station Zebra Read online

  ‘Submarines.’ Admiral Garvie pounced on the word. ‘You have been to sea in submarines, Dr Carpenter. Really sailed in them, I mean?’

  ‘I had to. We found that simulated tank escapes were no substitute for the real thing.’

  The admiral and Swanson looked unhappier than ever. A foreigner — bad. A foreign civilian -worse. But a foreign civilian with at least a working knowledge of submarines — terrible. I didn’t have to be beaten over the head to see their point of view. I would have felt just as unhappy in their shoes.

  ‘What’s your interest in Drift Ice Station Zebra, Dr Carpenter?’ Admiral Garvie asked bluntly.

  ‘The Admiralty asked me to go there, sir.’

  ‘So I gather, so I gather,’ Garvie said wearily. ‘Admiral Hewson made that quite plain to me already. Why you, Carpenter?’

  ‘I have some knowledge of the Arctic, sir. I’m supposed to be an expert on the medical treatment of men subjected to prolonged exposure, frostbite and gangrene. I might be able to save lives or limbs that your own doctor aboard might not.’

  ‘I could have half a dozen such experts here in a few hours,’ Garvie said evenly. ‘Regular serving officers of the United States Navy, at that. That’s not enough, Carpenter.’

  This was becoming difficult. I tried again. I said: ‘I know Drift Station Zebra. I helped select the site. I helped establish the camp. The commandant, a Major Halliwell, has been my closest friend for many years.’ The last was only half the truth but I felt that this was neither the time nor the place for over-elaboration.

  ‘Well, well,’ Garvie said thoughtfully. ‘And you still claim you’re just an ordinary doctor?’

  ‘My duties are flexible, sir.’

  ‘I’ll say they are. Well, then. Carpenter, if you’re just a common-or-garden sawbones, how do you explain this?’ He picked a signal form from the table and handed it to me. ‘This has just arrived in reply to Commander Swanson’s radioed query to Washington about you.’

  I looked at the signal. It read: ‘Dr Neil Carpenter’s bonafides beyond question. He may be taken into your fullest, repeat fullest confidence. He is to be extended every facility and all aid short of actually endangering the safety of your submarine and the lives of your crew.’ It was signed by the Director of Naval Operations.

  ‘Very civil of the Director of Naval Operations, I must say.’ I handed back the signal. ‘With a character reference like this, what are you worrying about? That ought to satisfy anyone.’

  ‘It doesn’t satisfy me,’ Garvie said heavily. ‘The ultimate responsibility for the safety of the Dolphin is mine. This signal more or less gives you carte blanche to behave as you like, to ask Commander Swanson to act in ways that might be contrary to his better judgment. I can’t have that.’

  ‘Does it matter what you can or can’t have? You have your orders. Why don’t you obey them?’

  He didn’t hit me. He didn’t even bat an eyelid. He wasn’t activated by pique about the fact that he wasn’t privy to the reason for the seeming mystery of my presence there, he was genuinely concerned about the safety of the submarine. He said: ‘If I think it more important that the Dolphin should remain on an active war footing rather than to go haring off on a wild-goose chase to the Arctic, or if I think you constitute a danger to the submarine, I can countermand the D.N.O.’s orders. I’m the C.-in-C. on the spot. And I’m not satisfied.’

  This was damnably awkward. He meant every word he said and he didn’t look the type who would give a hoot for the consequences if he believed himself to be in the right. I looked at both men, looked at them slowly and speculatively, the unmistakable gaze, I hoped, of a man who was weighing others in the balance: what I was really doing was thinking up a suitable story that would satisfy both. After I had given enough time to my weighing-up — and my thinking — I dropped my voice a few decibels and said: ‘Is that door soundproof?’

  ‘More or less,’ Swanson said. He’d lowered his own voice to match mine.

  ‘I won’t insult either of you by swearing you to secrecy or any such rubbish,’ I said quietly. ‘I want to put on record the fact that what I am about to tell you I am telling you under duress, under Admiral Garvie’s threat to refuse me transport if I don’t comply with his wishes.’

  ‘There will be no repercussions,’ Garvie said.

  ‘How do you know? Not that it matters now. Well, gentlemen, the facts are these. Drift Ice Station Zebra is officially classed as an Air Ministry meteorological station. Well, it belongs to the Air Ministry all right, but there’s not more than a couple of qualified meteorologists among its entire personnel.’

  Admiral Garvie refilled the tooth-glass and passed it to me without a word, without a flicker of change in his expression. The old boy certainly knew how to play it cool.

  ‘What you will find there,’ I went on, ‘are some of the most highly skilled men in the world in the fields of radar, radio, infra-red and electronic computers, operating the most advanced instruments ever used in those fields. We know now, never mind how, the countdown succession of signals the Russians use in the last minute before launching a missile. There’s a huge dish aerial in Zebra that can pick up and amplify any such signals within seconds of it beginning. Then long-range radar and infra-red home in on that bearing and within three minutes of the rocket’s lift-off they have its height, speed and course pin-pointed to an infinitesimal degree of error. The computers do this, of course. One minute later the information is in the hands of all the anti-missile stations between Alaska and Greenland. One minute more and solid fuel infra-red homing anti-missile rockets are on their way; then the enemy missiles will be intercepted and harmlessly destroyed while still high over the Arctic regions. If you look at a map you will see that in its present position Drift Ice Station Zebra is sitting practically on Russia’s missile doorstep. It’s hundreds of miles in advance of the present DEW line — the distant early warning system. Anyway, it renders the DEW line obsolete.’

  ‘I’m only the office boy around those parts,’ Garvie said quietly. ‘I’ve never heard of any of this before.’

  I wasn’t surprised. I’d never heard any of it myself either, not until I’d just thought it up a moment ago. Commander Swanson’s reactions, if and when we ever got to Drift Station Zebra, were going to be very interesting. But I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. At present, my only concern was to get there.

  ‘Outside the Drift Station itself,’ I said, ‘I doubt if a dozen people in the world know what goes on there. But now you know. And you can appreciate how vitally important it is to the free world that this base be maintained in being. If anything has happened to it we want to find out just as quick as possible what has happened so that we can get it operating again.’

  ‘I still maintain that you’re not an ordinary doctor,’ Garvie smiled. ‘Commander Swanson, how soon can you get under way?’

  ‘Finish loading the torpedoes, move alongside the Hunley, load some final food stores, pick up extra Arctic clothing and that’s it, sir.’

  ‘Just like that? You said you wanted to make a slow-time dive out in the loch to check the planes and adjust the underwater trim — those missing torpedoes up front are going to make a difference you know.’

  ‘That’s before I heard Dr Carpenter. Now I want to get up there just as fast as he does, sir. I’ll see if immediate trim checks are necessary: if not, we can carry them out at sea.’

  ‘It’s your boat,’ Garvie acknowledged. ‘Where are you going to accommodate Dr Carpenter, by the way?’

  ‘There’s space for a cot in the Exec’s and Engineer’s cabin.’ He smiled at me. ‘I’ve already had your suitcase put in there.’

  ‘Did you have much trouble with the lock?’ I inquired.

  He had the grace to colour slightly. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a combination lock on a suitcase,’ he admitted. ‘It was that, more than anything else — and the fact that we couldn’t open it — that made the admiral and myself so suspi
cious. I’ve still one or two things to discuss with the admiral, so I’ll take you to your quarters now. Dinner will be at eight to-night.’

  ‘I’d rather skip dinner, thanks.’

  ‘No one ever gets seasick on the Dolphin, I can assure you,’ Swanson smiled.

  ‘I’d appreciate the chance to sleep instead. I’ve had no sleep for almost three days and I’ve been travelling non-stop for the past fifty hours. I’m just tired, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s a fair amount of travelling.’ Swanson smiled. He seemed almost always to be smiling, and I supposed vaguely that there would be some people foolish enough to take that smile always at its face value. ‘Where were you fifty hours ago, Doctor?’

  ‘In the Antarctic’

  Admiral Garvie gave me a very old-fashioned look indeed, but he let it go at that.

  TWO

  When I awoke I was still heavy with sleep, the heaviness of a man who has slept for a long time. My watch said nine-thirty, and I knew it must be the next morning, not the same evening: I had been asleep for fifteen hours.

  The cabin was quite dark. I rose, fumbled for the light switch, found it and looked around. Neither Hansen nor the engineer officer was there: they must have come in after I had gone to sleep and left before I woke. I looked around some more, and then I listened. I was suddenly conscious of the almost complete quiet, the stillness, the entire lack of any perceptible motion. I might have been in the bedroom of my own house. What had gone wrong? What hold-up had occurred? Why in God’s name weren’t we under way? I’d have sworn the previous night that Commander Swanson had been just as conscious of the urgency as I had been.

  I had a quick wash in the folding Pullman-type basin, passed up the need for a shave, pulled on shirt, trousers and shoes and went outside. A few feet away a door opened to starboard off the passage. I went along and walked in. The officers’ wardroom, without a doubt, with one of them still at breakfast, slowly munching his way through a huge plateful of steak, eggs and French fries, glancing at a magazine in a leisurely fashion and giving every impression of a man enjoying life to the luxurious full. He was about my own age, big, inclined to fat — a common condition, I was to find, among the entire crew who ate so well and exercised so little — with close-cropped black hair already greying at the temples and a cheerful intelligent face. He caught sight of me, rose and stretched out a hand.

  ‘Dr Carpenter, it must be. Welcome to the wardroom. I’m Benson. Take a seat, take a seat.’

  I said something, appropriate but quick, then asked: ‘What’s wrong? What’s been the hold-up? Why aren’t we under way?’

  ‘That’s the trouble with the world to-day,’ Benson said mournfully. ‘Rush, rush, rush. And where does all the hurry get them? I’ll tell you —’

  ‘Excuse me. I must see the captain.’ I turned to leave but he laid a hand on my arm.

  ‘Relax, Dr Carpenter. We are at sea. Take a seat.’

  ‘At sea? On the level? I don’t feel a thing.’

  ‘You never do when you’re three hundred feet down. Maybe four hundred. I don’t,’ he said expansively, ‘concern myself with those trifles. I leave them to the mechanics.’

  ‘Mechanics?’

  ‘The captain, engineer officer, people like those.’ He waved a hand in a generously vague gesture to indicate the largeness of the concept he understood by the term ‘mechanics’. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘We’ve cleared the Clyde?’

  ‘Unless the Clyde extends to well beyond the north of Scotland, the answer to that is, yes, we have.’

  ‘Come again?’

  He grinned. ‘At the last check we were well into the Norwegian Sea, about the latitude of Bergen.’

  ‘This is still only Tuesday morning?’ I don’t know if I looked stupid: I certainly felt it.

  ‘It’s still only Tuesday morning.’ He laughed. ‘And if you can work out from that what kind of speed we have been making in the last fifteen hours we’d all be obliged if you’d keep it to yourself.’ He leaned back in his seat and lifted his voice. ‘Henry!’

  A steward, white-jacketed, appeared from what I took to be the pantry. He was a tall thin character with a dark complexion and the long lugubrious face of a dyspeptic spaniel. He looked at Benson and said in a meaningful voice: ‘Another plate of French fries, Doc?’

  ‘You know very well that I never have more than one helping of that carbohydrated rubbish,’ Benson said with dignity. ‘Not, at least, for breakfast. Henry, this is Dr Carpenter.’

  ‘Howdy,’ Henry said agreeably.

  ‘Breakfast, Henry,’ Benson said. ‘And, remember, Dr Carpenter is a Britisher. We don’t want him leaving with a low opinion of the chow served up in the United States Navy.’

  ‘If anyone aboard this ship has a low opinion of the food,’ Henry said darkly, ‘they hide it pretty well. Breakfast. The works. Right away.’

  ‘Not the works, for heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘There are some things we decadent Britishers can’t face up to first thing in the morning. One of them is French fries.’

  He nodded approvingly and left. I said: ‘Dr Benson, I gather.’

  ‘Resident medical officer aboard the Dolphin, no less,’ he admitted. ‘The one who’s had his professional competence called into question by having a competing practitioner called in.’

  ‘I’m along for the ride. I assure you I’m not competing with anyone.’

  ‘I know you’re not,’ he said quickly. Too quickly. Quickly enough so that I could see Swanson’s hand in this, could see him telling his officers to lay off quizzing Carpenter too much. I wondered again what Swanson was going to say when and if we ever arrived at the Drift Station and he found out just how fluent a liar I was. Benson went on, smiling: ‘There’s no call for even one medico aboard this boat, far less two.’

  ‘You’re not overworked?’ From the leisurely way he was going about his breakfast it seemed unlikely.

  ‘Overworked! I’ve sick-bay call once a day and no one ever turns up — except the morning after we arrive in port with a long cruise behind us and then there are liable to be a few sore heads around. My main job, and what is supposed to be my speciality, is checking on radiation and atmosphere pollution of one kind or another — in the olden submarine days the atmosphere used to get pretty foul after only a few hours submerged but we have to stay down for months, if necessary.’ He grinned. ‘Neither job is very exacting. We issue each member of the crew with a dosimeter and periodically check a film badge for radiation dosage — which is invariably less than you’d get sitting on the beach on a moderately warm day.

  ‘The atmospheric problem is even easier. Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are the only things we have to worry about. We have a scrubbing machine that absorbs the breathed-out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumps it out into the sea. Carbon monoxide — which we could more or less eliminate if we forbade cigarette smoking, only we don’t want a mutiny on our hands when we’re three hundred feet down — is burned to dioxide by a special heater and then scrubbed as usual. And even that hardly worries me, I’ve a very competent engineman who keeps those machines in tip-top condition.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve a surgery here that will delight your heart, Dr Carpenter. Operating table, dentist’s chair, the lot, and the biggest crisis I’ve had yet is a cigarette burn between the fingers sustained by a cook who fell asleep during one of the lectures.’

  ‘Lectures?’

  ‘I’ve got to do something if I’m not to go round the bend. I spend a couple of hours a day keeping up with all the latest medical literature but what good is that if you don’t get a chance to practise it? So I lecture. I read up about places we’re going to visit and everyone listens to those talks. I give lectures on general health and hygiene and some of them listen to those. I give lectures on the perils of overeating and under-exercise and no one listens to those. I don’t listen to them myself. It was during one of those that the cook got burned. That’s why our friend Henry, the steward, adopts his supe
rior and critical attitude towards the eating habits of those who should obviously be watching their habits. He eats as much as any two men aboard but owing to some metabolic defect he remains as thin as a rake. Claims it’s all due to dieting.’

  ‘It all sounds a bit less rigorous than the life of the average G.P.’

  ‘It is, it is.’ He brightened. ‘But I’ve got one job — a hobby to me — that the average G.P. can’t have. The ice-machine. I’ve made myself an expert on that.’

  ‘What does Henry think about it?’

  ‘What? Henry?’ He laughed. ‘Not that kind of ice-machine. I’ll show you later.’

  Henry brought food and I’d have liked the maîtres d’hôtel of some allegedly five-star hotels in London to be there to see what a breakfast should be like. When I’d finished and told Benson that I didn’t see that his lectures on the dangers of overweight were going to get him very far, he said: ‘Commander Swanson said you might like to see over the ship. I’m at your complete disposal.’

  ‘Very kind of you both. But first I’d like to shave, dress and have a word with the captain.’

  ‘Shave if you like. No one insists on it. As for dress, shirt and pants are the rig of the day here. And the captain told me to tell you that he’d let you know immediately anything came through that could possibly be of any interest to you.’

  So I shaved and then had Benson take me on a conducted tour of this city under the sea: the Dolphin, I had to admit, made any British submarine I’d ever seen look like a relic from the Ice Age.

  To begin with, the sheer size of the vessel was staggering. So big had the hull to be to accommodate the huge nuclear reactor that it had internal accommodation equivalent to that of a 3,000-ton surface ship, with three decks instead of the usual one and lower hold found in the conventional submarine. The size, combined with the clever use of pastel paints for all accommodation spaces, working spaces and passageways, gave an overwhelming impression of lightness, airiness and above all, spaciousness.

  He took me first, inevitably, to his sick-bay. It was at once the smallest and most comprehensively equipped surgery I’d ever seen, whether a man wanted a major operation or just a tooth filled, he could have himself accommodated there. Neither clinical nor utilitarian, however, was the motif Benson had adopted for the decoration of the one bulkhead in his surgery completely free from surgical or medical equipment of any kind — a series of film stills in colour featuring every cartoon character I’d ever seen, from Popeye to Pinocchio, with, as a two-foot square centrepiece, an immaculately cravatted Yogi Bear industriously sawing off from the top of a wooden signpost the first word of a legend which read ‘Don’t feed the bears.’ From deck to deckhead, the bulkhead was covered with them.